That only works when there is diligent supervision over trolls by the mods. Let’s say someone signs up this morning and starts pasting saved lists about his obsession all over the place. We might respond by reporting his posts. A few people will feed him, and others will post several DNFTT messags. By the end of the day, his account will almost surely be banned, his posts deleted, and his memory erased.
Badchad, on the other hand, has been pasting saved lists about his obsession for years now. He doesn’t defend them, he just pastes them. When you refute each item in them, he either ignores you or responds by pasting more. Note that his response to my recent refutation was to say that Jesus is a cunt and I am a nutjob. Whatever truth value that statement might hold, it certainly is not a defense of his pasted list.
He also is a liar, as I proved earlier, and though he is representing himself to you as fighting a noble cause against liberal Christianity — you know, the tolerant Christians who are accepting of gays and minorities — he has in fact been battling only one: Poly. In the past, he has said that he targets Poly because Poly is somehow symbolic of, or represents, the rest of us. Now he is saying that he targets liberal Christianity in general, which is a lie.
But let us, for the sake of argument, stipulate that indeed he does fight against liberal Christianity. Surely, it gives one pause to wonder why. Why fight the Christians who are not bigots, and who believe that gays and other minorities ought to be church leaders and fully accepted in society? He will tell you some bizarre tale about how we are hypocrites for loving Jesus and loving gays at the same time.
If he is being honest about that — and we’ve ignored several of his lies to get to this point — then his gripe is against hypocrisy. But if that is the case, then why has he not attacked the hypocrisy of, say, the Bush administration? If his concern is hypocrisy, then he should be attacking the whole staff except for Tom because if Tom is showing favoritism, it is because he is Christian. It is the rest of the staff who are hypocrites if they are allowing Tom to do that.
In point of fact, he attacks one and only one alleged hypocrisy: that of liberal Christians; and within that subset, he actively pursues one and only one person: Polycarp. After many years of witnessing all this, I’ve finally put together a picture that seems reasonable to me, and it goes like this…
Badchad is not an atheist at all. He hates the liberal Christian God. Atheists do not hate God. They do not believe in God — a prerequisite to hating Him. He is, in fact, a conservative Christian, possibly a fundamentalist because all his pasted lists use the King James version of the Bible, popular among that group. He is using atheism as a cover because he knows that as a fundamentalist Christian, his behavior would long ago have been shut down. If he is an atheist, then he is the worst defender of atheism you have ever had the misfortune of having on your side.
And finally, he is a bigot. He is bothered by the liberal Christian acceptance of gays and minorites. He believes that we have besmirched the Fred Phelps Jesus that he himself adores. The only reason to target Poly, who is just as accepting of atheists as he is of gays, and to drive Poly away from posting, which is what Badchad gloats that he has done, is to silence one of the board’s greatest champions of rights and tolerance for gays and minorites.
So there you have it. Badchad is a fundamentalist Christian bigot who is himself a liar and a hypocrite, operating in the guise of a half-hearted atheist (who never participats in, say, creationism threads), intent on shutting down the board’s greatest facilitator between believers and non-believers and its greatest champoin of gay rights and the rights of minorities. It is with acceptance of that premise that everything about him makes sense.
